MCN Interview: David Hollander

David Hollander
Writer/Director of Personal Effect

It seems to be a more and more common practice; smaller films that don’t have the advertising budget of blockbusters making brief appearances in theaters before heading to the more profitable DVD and Blu-ray rack. These days, even if you have big movie stars attached, there’s never any guarantee that the film will get a theatrical release.

In fact, with those big stars attached, there’s an even bigger chance that they might just throw their names on the cover of a DVD and attract bigger sales without the millions of dollars required for an advertising push.

David Hollander’s Personal Effects is one of those films. A longtime television writer/creator, Hollander got to make his first big-screen film with Michelle Pfeiffer, Ashton Kutcher and Kathy Bates. And now, he has to settle for a couple of exclusive showings on both coasts (March 5th at 7:30pm in Los Angeles at the Aero Theatre and March 16th at 9:15pm in NYC at the IFC Center).

Stories like this are always fascinating to me because they rarely have to do with the quality of the film. I’m amazed that a lot of decent films don’t get a fair shake at the box office, which has the double-edged result of making that film seem worse than it is because it went straight to video while also improving the straight to video market with its quality. So I decided it might be a good idea to e-mail a couple of questions to Mr. Hollander and below are his responses.

Noah Forrest: Firstly, give us your best sales pitch on your film, Personal Effects, in two sentences.

David Hollander: It’s a simple story about loss, love and acceptance that features lovely and surprising performances from Ashton Kutcher and Michelle Pfeiffer, beautiful cinematography from Elliot Davis and a haunting score from Johann Johannson. It respects its audience and stays with them.

Noah Forrest: How did you come across the original story and what about it spoke to you and made you want to adapt it?

David Hollander: I’ve long been an admirer of Rick Moody and believe him to be one of, if not, the finest writers of his generation. When his book of short stories Demonology came out, Mansion on the Hill, its opening novella, spoke to me. It’s an epistolary story, a letter from a brother to his dead sister that discusses what his life has been like in the year since her death on the eve of her marriage in a drunken car accident. Despite its heavy concept, the novella itself is seriocomic – the main character ends up working in a wedding factory of sorts in upstate New York where her former fiancé ends up getting married, and exacting some sort of emotional, cathartic revenge by attempting a small, pathetic attempt to sabotage the fiance’s wedding.

The script for Personal Effects came out nothing like that novella. Which has nothing to do with the beautiful quality of Rick’s story, and everything to do with the fact that I realized, halfway into the writing, that the story I was writing wanted to merge with another story that came from my own life, about a murder of a girl I knew well and the repercussions it had on our community. So a hybrid formed – Rick’s main character turned into two characters in my film – one a grieving brother paralyzed by the pain and helplessness he feels in the aftermath of his sister’s killing, the other in a recent widow who lost her husband in the same type of violent manner. The widow’s story became the wedding side of the script, the brother’s story became the revenge side of the plot, and the love story that grew out of their relationship the way they attempted to heal each other’s pain became the main thrust of the screenplay.

Noah Forrest: Since the film has to do with grief counseling, how much research did you do on that type of therapy?

David Hollander: I didn’t really get into grief counseling research as much as I tapped into personal experiences of loss. The film has a support group in the middle of a few scenes, but doesn’t really delve too deeply into the actual field of that type of therapy. It’s more about how a community of people who share similar experiences attempt to support one another.

Noah Forrest: How did it come to be that for your first major motion picture, you were able to snag major movie stars like Ashton Kutcher and Michelle Pfeiffer?

David Hollander: The simple answer is that they read and liked the script. The more complicated answer is that it took time to turn their positive responses into a commitment to get in front of the cameras and actually do it.That took several years. To go from the meetings and the ‘yeah I like your script’ to the first day of principal photography.

Michelle came to it first, then Hairspray took her out of the making of it. I waited another year and a half until she was again available, and during that year met with many actors who were interested in playing Walter. Ashton had a great understanding of the role, and not because of the age difference in the love story, but more in the sense of being from Iowa, having a strong and complicated bond with his siblings, and understanding the working class culture of the characters.

Noah Forrest: With major movie stars comes major expectations, in a way; so why are we just hearing about this movie now?

David Hollander: Despite the reputations and recognizabiliy of the lead actors, Personal Effects was a very modestly budgeted independent film. We shot it in five weeks on a budget that was less than four million dollars below the line. There was nothing flashy about what we were doing – simply trying to tell a simple story well. We had no studio and no real publicity machine behind it, and all expected that the film would live as an art house release.

What we didn’t expect was the economic downturn that accompanied the film’s completion and a market that wasn’t gobbling up films like ours. We have no high concept, no overt sexuality, no real violence. Ultimately, while the film sold very well and quickly in the foreign markets, to DVD and to television, a theatrical release wasn’t aggressively pursued by its investors or deemed essential. Which has been a source of sadness and frustration but is also a reality artists have to deal with in today’s market. This is why we are choosing to honor and celebrate the film with one special screening at the Aero Theater in Los Angeles on March 5th at 7:30pm for all those that want to attend and then in New York at the IFC Center on March 16th at 9:15pm.

Noah Forrest: What kind of movies did you watch as inspiration for Personal Effects? Either in terms of the story or the look of it.

David Hollander: Hal Ashby. Ingmar Bergman. Early Mike Nichols. These film makers have highly influenced the way I think about telling stories.

Noah Forrest: When you’re making a film, how inclusive are you in the process? Do you prefer to film the script as written or would you prefer it to be more of a collaboration? And with the actors you had, did that make you more comfortable if they improvised?

David Hollander: I think of a film script as a piece of architecture. It’s my job to provide the frame work for the actors in terms of situations and structure of story. It’s the actors job to choose how they wish to behave within that framework. I have always been a minimalist when it comes to dialogue – I’m more interested in behavior than I am in the words the characters speak. For the most part, we pared the script down to the very essentials looked for behavior. Ashton, for example, only delivers a couple of lines during the first fifteen minutes of the film. We were, in a way, the anti-improvisation set for this particular film. We were all pretty committed to silence.

Noah Forrest: You’ve spent a lot of your career in television; can you speak a bit to the differences between making a film today and creating a television show? Which is more difficult to get a green light for? Also, do you find it true that television is really more of a writer’s medium?

David Hollander: Filmmaking gives the writer and director the benefit of time. To me, that’s the fundamental difference. Making film creates space for revisions and refinements of image, longer relationship to pre-production, to design and cinematography. Image drives everything, or at least should.

In television, the creator of a show faces different challenges. Renewability of story, relatability of concept , a design that can be refined and re-purposed week after week after week. It’s a different form of originality if you will – television needs to be shared with many collaborators, many different writers, directors, actors and executives.

Film making has different pressures – everything is told at once, the story does have a measured end. There is one voice – the director – and one unique shot at making the story work.

For me, the big difference was the lack of having to write so many scripts. Focusing on just one story for an extended period of time is a tremendous pleasure when one is accustomed to writing a dozen or so scripts over the same time.

In terms of green lights…that’s hard to say. In my personal experience, television has come more easily to me. Others would say the opposite is true.

And yes, television is a writer’s medium. There is no comparison to the kind of control the show runner wields over the quality and style of an episodic television show, particularly in the dramatic form. To make television, one must not only love to write, but write prolifically and accurately. The simple fact is that the show running writer holds the process hostage – the scripts must come, the episodes are ordered long before the scripts are created, and the studios and networks simply have to trust that the writer comes through for them. Not so in feature films where nothing happens until the script is completed and refinements happen over time.

Noah Forrest: What’s the next project lined up for you? And in a perfect world, would you rather it be a film or a TV show?

David Hollander: I’m currently the writing show runner of “The Cleaner”. We start filming on Monday and I have a very heavy hand in the writing of all of this year’s episodes.

Also in the works is a film based on the life of Joe Namath for Jake Gyllenhaal to star at Universal. Given the chance, I would love to direct another film. While I love creating and running television shows, there is nothing like being able to work on a film.

Noah Forrest: Final question: what are some of your favorite filmmakers and movies of all-time?

David Hollander: Again, Hal Ashby tops my list.

In terms of today, I am a fan of Thomas McCarthy, Todd Field, James Gray, Darren Aronofsky, John Cameron Mitchell, and Sean Penn.

- Noah Forrest
March 6, 2009